Tracks not taken

Sorting through the clutter in the shed at the weekend, I found a few old track plans that date back to some time B.C. (Before Career). Growing up I was fortunate enough to have a bedroom big enough to swallow, at first, a OO 12′ x 4′ “train set”* which then had a bit of OO9 squeezed in and mutated through several permutations of the heavy chipboard baseboards into what you see below.

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This was 8′ x 2′ along one wall, followed by a small 1′ square piece to step around a chimney breast, and then a further 4′ x 2′ on the next wall. In concept it was a kind of all-preserved Blaenau Ffestiniog, with an ex-GWR branchline arriving through the hills on the high level and narrow gauge below. I envisaged the NG site as being the former junction between passenger and quarry lines, hence the space for multiple tracks, and that both railways would once have continued to the right – standard gauge to an interchange yard and narrow all the way to the coast.

I actually got (by my standards) a fair way along with this before moving to London to begin work at 19. Once I was settled I managed to get one of the boards along with me, with plans for something smaller, but this fizzled out before much progress was made and all my stock was put away again for the best part of a decade. If I’d known then that the G&DNGRS was, relatively speaking, on my doorstep things might have turned out quite differently.

Of course a fairly modest track plan typically spawns wilder and more ambition variations, and mine was no different.

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Here the narrow gauge has swapped elevations with the standard, and the whole thing curves right around into a U shape with a standard gauge fiddle yard and small dockside scene, while the NG line continues via a passing station to a larger base up in the hills. I have even roughed in the scenery in the space left by the operating well to get an idea of how things fitted together.

From memory I think I erected the boards in this configuration once, to see if it would work, and still leave space to have a bed, etc. I think it did, and had I not gone off to seek my fortune then who knows…

About this blog

Fairlight Works was first set up in 2006, when I returned to narrow gauge railway modelling after a break of several years, to document the construction of an OO9 (4mm:ft scale on 9mm gauge track) layout set at Fairlight around the Kent/Sussex border on the south coast of England. The concept was inspired by the High Weald Light Railway, which was the background to an O16.5 (7mm:ft scale on 16.5mm gauge track) layout called Hawkhurst, built in the 1990s by Dave Holman.

For a time I owned one of Dave's later layouts - Cranbrook - another part of the same fictional railway, but found that 7mm scale didn't suit me as well as I'd hoped. Through various other diversions of scale and theme the idea of the HWLR always stayed with me.

And so after a quiet period for personal modelling, while establishing Narrow Planet as a supplier of narrow gauge kits and etched items, I've decided to once again try my hand at building Fairlight in 009. Hopefully this time with more success.